Simple enough, title says it all.
The Wind Waker took Zelda in a new direction. I was pretty optimistic, since I played through
Spirit Tracks and loved every second of it. Unfortunately, WW was more... meh.
It's definitely not a bad game by any means. It looks nice, there's some intense action and cool puzzle solving, as well as tons of side quests. But unfortunately, all the good Zelda mechanics feel weighed down by the sailing.
I find sailing to be the most boring, clunky, unappealing feature I've seen in a Zelda game to date. While the boat is cool, after a while I found the long travel time grating on me. In the early stages, I could put the controller down for minutes at a time with no ill consequence. But the combat is even worse. To use your cannon, you must completely stop your ship, often from top speed. Then you must aim your cannon without the assistance of L-targeting, keeping in mind a single shot can knock you off your boat and back to square one.
This is fine for slow-moving foes like pirate ships, but often you have to fight incredibly fast enemies that stay out of your bow's range. You are essentially stun-locked trying to get back on your boat and aim the bloody cannon. And once the battle is over, it still takes unreasonably long times to get where you're going. The fast-travel song is easily the most useful in the game.
I would call this nitpicking, but sailing is essential through the entire game.
However, the rest of the game is typical Zelda quality. It's really a shame that the sailing drags the game down so much, because some of the dungeons are cool and the boss fights are incredibly tense.
Unfortunately, this game falls prey to all the stereotypes: there's the fire level, the forest level (two of them), the fortress level, the lava level, etc. Every item you collect is recycled from a previous Zelda game, except for the grappling hook and titular instrument. But even the grappling hook should have been combined with the hookshot.
But this is really nitpicking, especially for a Nintendo game and doubly so for a Zelda game. It's still fun, just not as fun as some others I can name. The pirate theme is kind of cool at times, and I love every music track from the game. It's just a shame that the sailing was so phoned in, because with more work that could have made an okay game truly shine.
Also, they kind of wait until the end to carry on the passage of time/moving on/looking to the future/etc. theme from OoT but at this point I'm really nitpicking. Check it out if you like pirates or Zelda or both.